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10 August 2013

Scientific Study finding In last 2000 years caste system formed
A new study conducted by a team of scientists from Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) in Hyderabad and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA indicated that or says that
Endogamy or the practice of marrying within a certain group, started about 2,000 years ago in the Indian subcontinent

Findings were published on August 8, 2013 in the American Journal of Human Genetics

Study findings describe how the Indian people married each other in different communities or even married outsiders and how slowly caste system evolved and Indian people started to marry only within caste.

1) The paper described that in the pre-historic India, there were only two ancestral populations; Ancestral North Indians (ANI), - who are related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans

2)Ancestral South Indians (ASI), who are primarily from the subcontinent.

Further, they have demonstrated that all contemporary populations in India show evidence of a genetic admixture of the above two ancestral (ANI and ASI) groups.

However, at that point of time, they could not establish the precise date of admixture.

Scientist studied about one million genetic markers in 73 additional Indian populations, predominantly represented by Dravidian and Indo-European speakers.

According to the BHU spokesperson, the researchers took advantage of the fact that genomes of Indian people are a mosaic of chromosomal segments of ANI and ASI ancestry.

They maintained that originally when the ANI and ASI populations mixed , these segments would have been extremely long, extending the entire lengths of chromosomes.

However, after admixture these segments would have broken up at one or two places per chromosome, per generation, recombining the maternal and paternal genetic material that occurs during the production of egg and sperm.

By measuring the length of the chromosome segments of ANI and ASI ancestry in Indian genomes, the scientists were thus able to obtain precise estimate of the age of population mixture, which they infer varied about 1900 to 4200 years, depending on the population analyzed.

They observed that only a few thousand years ago, the Indian population structure was vastly different from today.

The caste system has been around for a long time, but not forever. Prior to about 4000 years aho there was no mixture.

After that, widespread mixture affected almost every group in India, even the most isolated tribal groups.

And finally, endogamy set in and froze everything in place. They further maintained that the fact that every population in India evolved from randomly mixed populations suggests that social classifications like the caste system are not likely to have existed in the same way before the mixture.

Thus, the present-day structure of the caste system came into being only relatively recently in Indian history.

While the findings show that no groups in India are free of such mixture, the researchers did identify a geographic element. Groups in the north tend to have more recent dates and southern groups have older dates.

This is likely because the northern groups have multiple mixtures. But once established, the caste system became genetically effective, the researchers observed.

Mixture across groups became very rare.

According to the study, an important consequence of these results is that the high incidence of genetic and population-specific diseases that is characteristic of present-day India is likely to have increased only in the past few thousand years when groups in India started following strict endogamous marriage.

Dr Thangaraj said, “We predict that it was only in the last 2,000 years that the caste system was formed. This had a lot of medical implication as the mutation is circulating only among these groups. So, genetic diseases increased after the caste system was enforced.”

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Saturday, August 10, 2013

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comments:

There are advantages and limitations to the caste system. It has become a fashion to talk only about the limitations, but leave out the advantages. There are solid reasons on why the caste system was created and why it remained in existence for so long. I hope this academic exercise will put in a more balanced perspective on the same.